The 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo were an attack on Syrian Jews in Aleppo, Syria in December 1947, following the United Nations vote in favour of partitioning Palestine. The attack, a part of an anti-Jewish wave of unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, resulted in some 75 Jews murdered and several hundred wounded. [1] In the aftermath of the riots, half the city's Jewish population fled the city. [2]
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Syria gained independence from France in April 1946. The Haganah's illegal immigration operative Akiva Feinstein wrote in 1947 that the new Syrian government then commenced persecuting the Jewish minority, [3] that all Jewish clerks working for the French bureaucracy were fired, and the government tried to stifle Jewish businesses. [3] At the time of the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, the Jewish community in Aleppo numbered around 10,000 and went back around two thousand years. [4]
After the vote in favour of the partition of Palestine, the government abetted and organised Aleppo's Arab inhabitants to attack the city's Jewish population. [3] [4] [5] The exact number of those killed remains unknown, but estimates are put at around 75, with several hundred wounded. [1] [5] [6] Ten synagogues, five schools, an orphanage and a youth club, along with several Jewish shops and 150 houses were set ablaze and destroyed. [7] Damaged property was estimated to be valued at US$2.5m. [8] [9] During the pogrom the Aleppo Codex, an important medieval manuscript of the Torah, was lost and feared destroyed. The book reappeared (with 40% of pages missing) in Israel in 1958. [10]
Following the attack, the Jewish community went into a steep decline. Wealthy Jews escaped the day after the pogrom and many more fled in small groups in subsequent months. [2] [4] Their property was forfeited and on December 22 the Syrian Government enacted a law forbidding Jews from selling their property. [3] As of 2012, no Jews live in Aleppo. [4]
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. It formally began following the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight on 14 May 1948; the Israeli Declaration of Independence had been issued earlier that day, and a military coalition of Arab states entered the territory of Mandatory Palestine in the morning of 15 May.
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places became known retrospectively as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
In the 20th century, approximately 900000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia. Primarily a consequence of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, the mass movement mainly transpired from 1948 to the early 1970s, with one final exodus of Iranian Jews occurring shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979–1980. An estimated 650000 (72%) of these Jews resettled in Israel.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as Resolution 181 (II).
This is a partial timeline of Zionism in the modern era, since the start of the 16th century.
Yishuv, or HaYishuv HaIvri, or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be'Eretz Yisra'el, denote the body of Jewish residents in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The term came into use in the 1880s, when there were about 25,000 Jews living in that region, and continued to be used until 1948, by which time there were some 630,000 Jews there. The term is still in use to denote the pre-1948 Jewish residents in Palestine, corresponding to the southern part of Ottoman Syria until 1918, OETA South in 1917–1920, and Mandatory Palestine in 1920–1948.
The Aleppo Codex is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, and was endorsed for its accuracy by Maimonides. Together with the Leningrad Codex, it contains the Ben-Asher masoretic tradition.
The 1947 Jerusalem Riots occurred following the vote in the UN General Assembly in favour of the 1947 UN Partition Plan on 29 November 1947. 8 Jews were reported killed.
The history of the Jews in Iraq is documented from the time of the Babylonian captivity c. 586 BCE. Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world's oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities.
Syrian Jews are Jews who lived in the region of the modern state of Syria, and their descendants born outside Syria. Syrian Jews derive their origin from two groups: from the Jews who inhabited the region of today's Syria from ancient times, and sometimes classified as Mizrahi Jews. Mizrahi is a generic term for the Jews with an extended history in Western Asia or North Africa); and from the Sephardi Jews who fled to Syria after the Alhambra Decree forced the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Syrian Jews had predominantly two origins: those who inhabited Syria from early times and the Sephardim who fled to Syria after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 CE. There were large Jewish communities in Aleppo, Damascus, and Qamishli for centuries. In the early 20th century, a large percentage of Syrian Jews immigrated to Palestine, the U.S. and Latin America. The largest Syrian-Jewish community is now located in Israel and is estimated to number 80,000.
The Arab–Israeli conflict is the phenomenon involving political tension, military conflicts, and other disputes between various Arab countries and Israel, which escalated during the 20th century. The roots of the Arab–Israeli conflict have been attributed to the support by Arab League member countries for the Palestinians, a fellow League member, in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict; this in turn has been attributed to the simultaneous rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism towards the end of the 19th century, though the two national movements had not clashed until the 1920s.
The Menarsha synagogue attack took place on 5 August 1949 in the Jewish quarter of Damascus, Syria. The grenade attack claimed the lives of 12 civilians and injured about 30. Most of the victims were children.
The 1945 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania was the most violent rioting against Jews in North Africa in modern times. From November 5 to November 7, 1945, more than 140 Jews were killed and many more injured in a pogrom in British-military-controlled Tripolitania. 38 Jews were killed in Tripoli from where the riots spread. 40 were killed in Amrus, 34 in Zanzur, 7 in Tajura, 13 in Zawia and 3 in Qusabat.
Contemporaneously with the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine, a riot against the Jewish community of Manama, in the British Protectorate of Bahrain, on December 5, 1947. A mob of Iranian and Trucial States sailors ran through the Manama Souq, looted Jewish homes and shops, and destroyed the synagogue. One Jewish woman died; she was either killed or died from fright.
Mandatory Palestine was a geopolitical entity that existed between 1920 and 1948 in the region of Palestine under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
The Arab Higher Committee or the Higher National Committee was the central political organ of Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine. It was established on 25 April 1936, on the initiative of Haj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and comprised the leaders of Palestinian Arab clans and political parties under the mufti's chairmanship. The committee was outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official.
The 1948 Palestine war was fought in the territory of what had been, at the start of the war, British-ruled Mandatory Palestine. It is known in Israel as the War of Independence and in Arabic as a central component of the Nakba. It is the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict. During the war, the British terminated the Mandate and withdrew, ending a period of rule which had begun in 1917, during the First World War. Beforehand, the area had been part of the Ottoman Empire. In May 1948, the State of Israel was established by the Jewish Yishuv, its creation having been declared on the last day of the Mandate. During the war, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced.
Iraqi Jews in Israel, also known as the Bavlim, are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Iraqi Jewish communities, who now reside within the state of Israel. They number around 450,000.
